Evaluation: Influences

Comment on your influences:

For our AS project, we produced an opening sequence for a horror film. This year we wanted to excel and test our ability by experimenting with a different genre.There are many sub-genres of drama, for example, Social, War, Mental illness, Race relations, Youth rebellion etc.  We agreed on the film concept of mental illness, specifically depression. This was a topic I felt would really push and test our boundaries for the film research and planning.

To fully understand the concept of depression we conducted an in-depth research into the subject, especially amongst teenagers and women. Our main aim was to find the symptoms and causes of depression amongst this group.

There wasn’t a fixed or one answer to why women and teens experienced depression, but some of the typical causes were due to stress, bullying, school, home life, the family, and work. We used our findings from the research on depression, as the starting point, for brainstorming ideas for our trailer. We gained additional inspiration from personal experience from people around us, willing to share their stories, News articles of real-life stories and from books like Pieces of You by Daniel Armand and Autobiographies. From this we were able to come up with a few original ideas for the narrative and storyline, which we went on to further, develop. 

The reason we chose to make a drama film about depression was because we wanted to raise awareness about the mental illness. It’s a topic most people avoid; find uncomfortable and difficult talking about because its perceived negatively in society.  Therefore we wanted to inform the audience about the disorder through our trailer film. Additionally, when someone loses a loved one to depression the focus in only one the individual that is suffering. However wanted to break the border of how depression can affect the patient as well as those around them e.g. family and friends.